Prescription: More sun
ByResearch suggests that a lack of sunlight could be tied to variety of illnesses
Gene Stubbs will admit that just a few years ago he might have laughed at the very 
research he’s now involved in. He might have thought the theory he’s been testing would have been better suited for zealots desperate for a simple explanation where none existed.
Here’s the theory: Autism might be caused by mothers not getting enough sunlight or Vitamin D supplementation during their pregnancies.
Now, Stubbs isn’t a parent of an autistic child grasping at straws. He’s a respected associate professor emeritus of psychiatry and pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University who has turned into a researcher in his retirement. And he’s well aware that plenty of people have claimed to know why autism rates have skyrocketed in recent years, and that most of their explanations had little to do with hard science.
But if Stubbs is right about the autism/Vitamin D link, he and a growing legion of scientists across the country might also be right about their larger theory – that lack of sun exposure and Vitamin D explains Oregon’s high rates of depression, multiple sclerosis, bone disease, cancers and dozens of other maladies, including colds and flu.
In short, if sun exposure is necessary for good health, Portland residents are in a boatload of trouble. Vitamin D pills may help, but nobody is certain the pills are as effective as sun exposure.
Vitamin D deficiency may be the latest medical fad, but this one has a fair amount of scientific evidence to support it. Even skeptics, who remember the grandiose claims made about Vitamin E a couple decades ago, are reluctant to say there’s nothing to the Vitamin D theory. Instead, they preach caution to colleagues who appear too quick to rush to judgment.
But consider that in researching this story the Tribune interviewed more than a dozen physicians and scientists with an interest in Vitamin D, and every single one, including skeptics, said they take daily Vitamin D supplements themselves.
The basic theory goes like this: for the past 20 years or so, fear of skin cancer and an increasingly indoor culture have kept us out of the sun, or lathered with sun block when we do go outside. We get most of our Vitamin D, which is really more a hormone than a vitamin, from exposure to the sun. So nationally, Vitamin D blood levels have been plummeting.
In fact, they have been dropping so much that even people in Arizona and Florida now have Vitamin D levels nearly as low as people who live in Oregon, where it’s almost impossible to get enough sun exposure.
That’s why Michael Holick, professor of medicine at Boston University Medical Center, author of “The Vitamin D Solution,” and the unofficial godfather of Vitamin D theory, says that he expects southerly climes to see a rise in the rates of diseases that historically have been more prevalent in Oregon.